Professional paper
Parallel Plot as a Basic Compositional Procedure in Milan Kundera's Plays
Lenka Jungmannová
; Czech Academy of Sciences
Abstract
In the study, the author analyses Milan Kundera's dramas The Owners of the Keys, The Blunder and Jacques and His Master chronologically, as well as the unknown – and never acknowledged by the writer – play Juro Jánošík from 1973, which was signed by playwright Karel Steigerwald. The study attempts to show how Kundera's dramatic work grew out of his collaboration with the workshop at the Prague National Theatre in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The workshop was founded by director Otomar Krejča and dramaturgist Karel Kraus, who commissioned the authors to use a compositional procedure of parallel plots. Along with this, the author traces the development of Kundera's plays in terms of their relationship to totalitarian ideology: while in the first play the writer projected a plot that was charged with communist ideology, in the subsequent plays he began to criticize totalitarian mechanisms. All of Kundera's plays responded to the political situation in former Czechoslovakia.
Keywords
Milan Kundera; the play; Czech literature; Czech theatre
Hrčak ID:
324703
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2024.
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